“I really don’t know what it was that evening that made me decide to call the
police, but I always say it was the sight of cleaning up my own blood.”
Lorraine, a British woman, was regularly beaten by her partner for eight years
before telling anybody. “People have asked me why I didn’t just leave, but my
partner made lots of threats to me which he always carried out. I was very, very
frightened of him. So you get to the point where you live with it, it becomes a
normal pattern of life, you adapt, you cope, you hide it.” In the UK, emergency
services receive an average of one call per minute about violence in the family.1